Don’t be Sad is an attempted self-help book from the cleric Aidh al-Qarni. While the focus of the book is to urge us to not be sad, the book does touch upon other aspects of life – how to be grateful, how to serve god, how to improve oneself, etc.
I would add the disclaimer that I
am an atheist and I did not grow up in an Islamic environment – however, I read
the book with no pre-conceived notions and I am mature enough to convert a god
inspired advice to a eliminate the elements of god and take in only the good.
The book turned out to be a best
seller and was highly popular; I often read reviews that even though the writer
was inspired from Islam, this book is appealing to everyone. There are some
aspects of religion that I find common across all – an all powerful god who has
everything pre-determined, a loving god who has created the entire universe,
etc. – so these are aspects that I was not a stranger to even though I was not
entirely familiar with the teachings of Islam. People of any faith if they are
open enough to read a text from another source can appreciate these aspects. I
also appreciated that he tried to encourage people to travel and read.
My laboured effort to say
something positive on the book ends here, the book was neither well written,
nor edited well and I normally do not mind minor printing errors when the book
is good but for a book like this, the least that one could have had was
flawless publishing (often had ‘1’ in place of ‘l’). Moreover, there was no
clear distinction between when he was quoting from the Quran and when he was
giving his own commentary; and for the first few pages – we had text in Arabic
and I don’t know why. I do not mind the Arabic as I find the script beautiful
even though I can’t read, but the use of Arabic has to be consistent. I found
that in the first fifty odd passages and then, it was just lost and there were
times where it was nearly impossible to distinguish where he was quoting the
verses and where it was a commentary.
Coming to the contents, this is
addressed to highly privileged Muslims of the world – where he told his
readers not to be ‘sad’ because they have a roof over their head, clothes to
wear, water to drink, food to eat, etc. I agree with the reasoning for those
who have these privileges (and probably those who are reading this book do) –
but then, I don’t think he can say these words with a straight face to the
people struggling in Yemen and Syria, the poor in Indonesia, Pakistan, India,
Bangladesh, etc. (the reason why I picked these states is because the author
repeatedly claims that there is nothing to be sad as they are following the one
true religion and have all their basic needs covered which is not true for a
lot of people in these countries that have a substantial population who adhere
to Islam).
I try my best to not bring in
logic to a book that fundamentally draws its inspiration from religion but I
need to say that this book had instances where it was unintentionally funny;
among the many contradictions, I would note one – as to how everything is pre-determined
by god so there is no reason to be sad, but that also implies that one being
sad at a particular moment is also pre-determined by god and so, why should one
resist this pre-determined decision of god to be sad at a particular moment?
It also must be noted that this
author is a known plagiarist from with multiple allegations of plagiarism –
including for this book (similarities with Dale Carnegie’s How to Stop
Worrying and Start Living). There was a comment in his book where he
condemned China for use of torture against their prisoners (and claimed they
would face god’s wrath); while I condemn those acts too, it was very strange
coming from someone in Saudi Arabia – which is known for its record on human
rights violations. Moreover, Saudi Arabia claims to do all this in the name of
Islam – I am not here to debate whether Saudi Arabia’s interpretation is right,
they probably are not – but the least he could have done, if that was his
opinion, was to condemn his own country there for misusing Islam for their own
political goals (isn’t hereditary succession against Islam to begin with?).
This book can be read if you can
overlook him using pejorative terms of people of other religions and countries,
if you could overlook misogyny and the obvious logical contradictions. Whether
you choose to be sad or not is different, but don’t read this book. I
award the book a rating of two on ten.
Rating – 2/10
No comments:
Post a Comment